


last night i had a dream that you adored me

by tiltingheartand



Category: Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-19
Updated: 2012-06-19
Packaged: 2017-11-08 01:59:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiltingheartand/pseuds/tiltingheartand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's like she's woken up in someone else's life, but she can't remember who she was before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	last night i had a dream that you adored me

Shilo walks around campus, sometimes, wears a hoodie she stole from James and isn't planning on giving back anytime soon and listens to her music and wonders why she feels so disconnected. Mostly she's fine, but sometimes she'll look around and wonder where she is. It's like she's woken up in someone else's life, but she can't remember who she was before. 

 

 

At night she curls up in bed with her laptop, sound in her headphones high enough that she can't hear anything beyond the movie she's watching, and wiggles her toes a little. They're warmer than usual, which is to say warm at all. It's sort of nice.

A few minutes later she has a heart attack when she looks up and James is in her room, looking concerned and also sort of sheepish. "I was just about to get your attention," he says. "Amber called me, said she was worried about you."

"Oh," she says, taking a few deep breaths and waiting for her blood pressure to get back to normal. "She shouldn't be," she says, "I'm fine. Really."

He raises an eyebrow, still brown even though the rest of his hair has cycled through the rainbow and back in the years she's known him.

She sighs. "Stay with me?"

"Always," he says, shucking his coat and boots and getting onto the bed with her. He puts his arm around her as she rearranges the comforter and unplugs her headphones, and she leans against his shoulder and shifts the computer so it's halfway between them.

"I didn't know it was _that_ free," Wadsworth says on the screen, and she smiles a little.

 

 

"You had a gig, didn't you," she says at lunch.

He looks up at her from his food, and she can tell he's thinking about lying. "Yes," he says, finally, and takes another bite.

"Why didn't you say anything?" She scowls, because she appreciates him, but she _knows_ how hard they've been working, and it's stupid that he just left. She would have been fine.

"You were more important," he says, and shrugs. "You're the world to me, you know that."

Suddenly she's so dizzy she can barely breathe, and she doesn't know why. She laughs it off when he asks what's wrong, takes a drink of her soda and tries to calm down, but she can't focus in any of her classes for the rest of the day.

 

 

She wakes up, heart pounding, and can't remember where she is. She only remembers when she sees her goggles laying on top of that textbook James meant to grab on the way out yesterday but forgot. She'd cracked it open this morning, but it was, predictably, all business, and despite knowing all the individual words she hadn't been able to make sense of any of the sentences.

He's working on a paper for another class tonight, she remembers, and he's probably not asleep but he needs to keep working, she tells herself, and rolls around until she's comfortable, tries to remember what she'd read before she'd given up on it in as much detail as possible until she falls asleep.

 

 

"Do you ever feel ..." she starts, and can't think of how to finish.

"Hm?" He looks up from his notes at her, blue eyes curious, but there's an edge of concern there too. There always is, these days.

"I don't know. Misplaced." She lifts one shoulder up in an awkward shrug, looking at everything but him. His place is messier than hers, except for the corner where he keeps his bass, but it doesn't bother her here like it would if hers was like this. It suits him, in a way.

He's trying not to ask what's wrong, she knows. "Once in a while," he settles on, shrugging back. A few minutes later she gives up on her textbook and closes it, leans against his shoulder. He reaches up and starts to comb his hand gently through her hair, and she closes her eyes and tries to forget everything else.

 

 

She wakes up screaming.

James is leaning over her, one of her hands in both of his, and when she makes eye contact he exhales heavily. "Jesus," he says. "You want to talk about it?"

She closes her eyes, sees her mother's corpse, a gun in her hands, her father dying in her arms. James sketching a bow from a garbage truck. Aunt Mag, impaled on a fencepost.

"Not really," she says, and tugs him back down.

 

 

The next morning she calls her father and tells him she loves him.

She wakes up only once, that night, at what the clock tells her is ten to four. She stares at the ceiling, listens to James snuffle and mumble beside her.

She goes back to sleep.


End file.
